Belén Garijo: Leadership in the Bioconvergence Revolution

Belén Garijo, Chair of the Executive Board and CEO of Merck Group, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“It was a genuine thrill to receive the first signed copy of the first-ever book about bioconvergence from our lead author and colleague Nina Siragusa.

This new scientific megatrend has only just begun to shift the focus of patient care from the diagnosis and treatment of disease to its prediction and prevention.

Bioconvergence is all about bringing together the best of biology, chemistry, digital, and engineering. So, it´s long been my ambition to ensure we leverage the diversification of Merck Group to claim pole position.

Holding this signed book in my hands was physical proof we are making bioconvergence a reality with our ONE Merck spirit, shared vision, and High-Impact Culture.

Thanks to Nina and her many other book authors and partners including Michelangelo Canzoneri, André T. Nemat, Laura Matz and Jean Enno Charton for inviting me to write the foreword for this book. You can read it below.

Throughout the modern history of science, disciplines such as biology and chemistry operated mainly in isolation. Breakthroughs were typically achieved within separate scientific siloes as individual scientists or small teams experienced a Eureka moment.

The cumulative benefits of this traditional scientific approach for humanity throughout recent centuries are undeniable. In recent decades, however, many organizations noticed a disturbing pattern in global scientific research – the overall speed and productivity of science across multiple research fields appeared to be slowing worldwide.

In semiconductors, for example, an increasing number of researchers questioned the sustainability of the observation made by Gordon Moore, widely known as Moore´s law, in 1965 regarding the doubling in the number of transistors in an integrated circuit roughly every two years. And in healthcare, the term Eroom´s law (the literal reverse of Moore´s law) was coined to note the progressively slower speeds and increasing costs required to discover new drugs.

Fortuitously, however, at around the same time as these research productivity concerns were intensifying at the dawn of the new millennium, a new scientific megatrend began to emerge.

The siloes that previously divided scientific research began to disappear as diverse teams from various scientific fields came together to help increase the speed and impact of scientific discovery.

We call this new multi-disciplinary scientific approach bioconvergence, as it harnesses a broad, complementary mix of technologies and expertise from across biotech, digital-tech and engineering. Over the last two decades, bioconvergence has led to many significant breakthroughs that have disrupted existing markets and created new ones.

Following recent breakthroughs in the development and application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the pace of scientific discovery is poised to accelerate exponentially once again.

As a global science and technology company with leading positions across Life Science, Healthcare, and Electronics, Merck is poised to help pioneer this new scientific era of bioconvergence.

Within our own multi-disciplinary teams, and together with our many partners worldwide, we are actively engaged in several bioconvergence-driven projects that can help make human life longer, better, and more sustainable for all. Most of all, we seek to transform patient care with the creation of more precise, personalized and predictive healthcare therapies that can be developed faster and more efficiently than ever before.

We firmly believe that bioconvergence will help to power the next wave of human progress. With this inaugural journal book on bioconvergence, we are pleased to be a participant and look forward to collaborations with many new and existing partners.”

Belén Garijo is the Chair of the Executive Board and CEO of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. She joined the company in 2011 as Chief Operating Officer of the Biopharma business, becoming President and CEO of Healthcare in 2015. In July 2020, Belén Garijo was appointed Vice Chairman of the Executive Board and Deputy CEO in addition to her role as CEO of the Healthcare business.

She moved from Deputy CEO to CEO in May 2021. Under her leadership, Healthcare at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, has become a key player in the area of oncology, immunology and immuno-oncology, after the profound repositioning of the portfolio, the reorganization of R&D and the transformation of the commercial model.

Before joining Merck, Belén Garijo served as the Senior Vice President of Global Operations Europe at Sanofi-Aventis and Global Integration Leader of Genzyme after its acquisition by Sanofi. She previously held several local and global executive positions, both in R&D and commercial, at various companies at the forefront of the Healthcare sector. She started her career as a practicing physician at La Paz hospital in Madrid before moving to the pharmaceutical industry. She is a medical doctor, specialized in clinical pharmacology.